


cease and desist

by crumbsfiction



Category: Death Note
Genre: Afterlife, Gen, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-25
Updated: 2016-01-25
Packaged: 2018-05-16 05:38:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5816272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crumbsfiction/pseuds/crumbsfiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snapshots from the nothingness, and everything that came before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cease and desist

The nights are long but never cold. L, of course, has bought only the finest of silk bed sheets and the fluffiest of down-filled duvets. It’s either because of his rather apparent love for comfort or simply because his bank account so generously allows it, Light isn’t too sure.

L barely sleeps, and Light adjusts his own schedule accordingly. On the rare occasions he looks over to find his companion unconscious, he looks simultaneously childlike and impossibly old.

 _He must have started young_ , Mogi said somewhere in the early days of the investigation, when L had left the room to take yet another phone call. _Too young, perhaps_ , Light’s father had added in a low voice, almost too quiet to catch.

Light wonders what counts as too young and how you know when you’ve passed the point.

 _Too young for what?_ He wanted to ask, but feared it would seem naïve.

-

L often speaks of death. Usually in a metaphorical way, philosophical, _do you believe in divine punishment, Light? What about the afterlife?_ His words are heavy with a thousand lives lost or wasted and Light wonders if L has ever seen someone die, not remembering that he has as well. 

Whenever he was in one of those moods, Light would call him melodramatic and roll his eyes, especially if it was late at night. L would throw him a quick glance over his shoulder, the barest hint of a smile on his lips. Not quite an apology, rather an attempt to scrub everything away by force, like he scrubs at his skin in the shower, until it’s red and raw.

_Let’s gloss this over. Let’s forget this ever happened. Let’s try again._

But L doesn’t gloss anything over, not ever.

He’s pushed and pushed and pushed, raised the stakes a thousand times over, because it’s personal now and L doesn’t lose.

Only -

-

There is gunfire, and screaming. Something hot dripping from his hand.

His hand?

Destroyed, now, by the impact of the bullet.

He wishes he could say that it didn’t hurt, he barely felt it, but that would be a lie.

It hurt like hell.

-

Now, everything is a subdued grey, blurry at best, and Light thinks of his mother’s reading glasses, neatly folded on the arm of the sofa. The steam from the rice cooker in the kitchen and the whirr of the heating fans in winter. He pulls everything he can from his memories, wrings them dry in hopes of finding something, anything, that will feel real.

He thinks of the cold air nipping his nose in January, the blossoms of trees in April, the humid heat of July – nothing. 

There are no seasons in this place, not even a sky. If Light had to, he would describe it as a solid grey, the kind of grey you’ll find at dusk on a particularity snowy day, but that wouldn’t be accurate either. The sky just simply is _not_.

Light feels like a teenager again, sixteen years old and empty. Wandering the streets of Tokyo, looking for purpose where there is none to be found. He’s wandering now too, except this place is more like a deserted cemetery and he can’t bring himself to hope that there will be any change of pace soon. Even when he had to drag himself through every day of school the soft pastels and bright lights of Tokyo were fickle and fleeting – this is eternity.

-

He finds L soon enough.

“Were you waiting for me?” he asks immediately, because he hasn’t been walking for very long and L has been here for an age and a half. 

“Don’t flatter yourself,” the once-detective replies and pushes his hair out of his eyes. His voice sounds exactly the same, if slightly raspier. It’s the first thing Light has heard since he got here and to him, it’s like finding a stream of clear water in the desert.

“What are you doing?” he asks, if only to hear L’s voice again. Anything but this deafening silence.

“I was speaking to someone,” he says, not meeting his eyes. “You interrupted me.”

Light glances around and finds only more grey.

“You’re seeing things. There’s no one here.”

“Isn’t there? Well, it’s no matter. You didn’t know him anyway.”

The floating dust particles shift around his face and Light can feel something resembling the smell of ash and burnt flesh.

L is silent for a moment, looks him up and down, scanning the gaping bullet holes and the tousled hair and the dull eyes. Then, “Shall we be on our way?”

Light nods and pretends to know where they’re going and why.

-

“I wish I could feel something. Anything.” Light is only talking to ward off the silence. In life he embraced it, not aware that there was always noise in the background - the bustle of traffic and voices of strangers to keep him from losing his mind. 

“Did you ever feel anything while you were alive?” L hasn’t changed. Still asks the same impossible questions, the ones Light would rather eat broken shards of glass than listen to. It’s a form of torture, and he’s missed it for years.

Light lets the words process for a moment, then: “Are you telling me I was depressed?”

“Are you telling me you weren’t? The signs were all there. I saw them.“

“While you were monitoring me without my consent.”

“Yes.” Light blinks. Normally he would have made up some hasty but well-articulated speech about how the ends justify the means, but today he doesn’t. “You went home, did your homework, went to sleep. This is ignoring the slaughtering of criminals in between tasks, of course.” The added comment earns L an eye-roll, but he pushes on nonetheless. “What were your aspirations? You goals?”

“I wanted to work with the NPA. You know this.”

L’s chest makes an odd rattling noise that sounds something like a car engine. “Because of your father,” he states, not a question this time.

“Maybe. What about you? You must have been in your early teens when you started working as a detective, going by your age and the span of L’s career. Was this what you wanted?” He never asked about L’s life before, never cared much for it. He knew prodding would get him nowhere, but now…

“I never said it was. But if it wasn’t what I wanted to do a decade later, don’t you think I would have quit?”

“I don’t know what you would have done. I don’t know you.”

L is silent for a moment, then –

“That’s true.”

They don’t bring it up again.

-

L speaks to himself, sometimes. Occasionally, Light will catch the glimpse of a face in the dust around them or the smell of motor oil, but mostly it’s just L, talking into empty space.

Mikami comes to him one day or night but he doesn’t speak, just watches him from afar. It’s like being haunted by the ghost of everyone he’s disappointed and despite himself, Light shudders. 

“What do you want from me?” Light asks the spectre, but when he reaches out, it crumbles back into delicate dust.

“Who are you talking to?” L asks, glancing at him from the corner of his eyes. Light hasn’t noticed it before, but L’s irises perfectly match their surroundings in all their colourlessness.

“It doesn’t matter. You didn’t know him.”

Mikami doesn’t appear again. 

-

“Maybe your father will pay us a visit one day,” L says out of the blue, and Light stops in his tracks.

“How did you know?”

L gives him a smirk. “A shot in the dark. But I was right, then. Did you kill him yourself or did you have someone else do it?”

Light folds his ruined hand into a fist and swings. Rather than the crack of L’s nose breaking in pieces and a stream of hot blood, there is just the feeling of plunging his hand gently into a bag of sand. 

L sighs. “Disappointing, isn’t it? This is why Misora and I can’t practice Capoeira anymore.”

“You can’t practice because you’re both dead,” Light spits outs and tries to reign in his anger. 

“Yes. Thank you for that,” L says and turns away. 

-

Light realises soon enough that there’s no destination to their travel. They’re simply moving through the nothingness, exploring the fact that there’s nothing to explore.

 _Just like real life,_ Light thinks bitterly, then, _this is real life now._

L speaks to his ghosts, Light occasionally glimpses his own.

“You’ll be ready to talk to them, one day,” L assures him in a rare moment of sincerity. “It just takes a while to prepare yourself.”

“I can’t wait,” Light says and doesn’t mean it. “If I only had you as company for all eternity, I think I would lose my mind.”

“Always such a talented liar,” L says with a smirk.

There are no footprints behind them.

**Author's Note:**

> ok i know mu is supposed to be absolute nothingness and not an actual place where you go after death. but i wanted to explore this anyway, because i'm obsessed with mortality. thank you for reading even though this probably makes no sense 8)


End file.
